Berlin Beckons Anew

On October 16, 1899, Corinth returned to Berlin, stopping in Leipzig for a brief visit with Dr. Ulrich, who had purchased two more paintings. In addi-

Figure 75
Lovis Corinth,  Portrait of Richard Israel , 1899.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 68 cm, B.-C. 190.
Present whereabouts unknown.
Photo: after Bruckmann.

tion to the Temptation of Saint Anthony , the physician now also owned Witches and the Self-Portrait with Skeleton . Corinth went to Berlin this time to oversee the hanging of his paintings for a one-man show at the gallery Reiner and Keller. It opened on October 20 and was well received. In December he participated in an exhibition of German realist painting at the gallery of Bruno and Paul Cassirer. It was most likely Leistikow who had paved the way for this introduction of Corinth's work on a larger scale in Berlin. Corinth, in turn, took the exhibitions as an excuse for an extended stay, an attractive prospect since Berlin was now beckoning in other ways. The portrait commissions that Leistikow had tried to obtain for him the previous winter finally began to materialize, promising sound financial support should he decide to settle permanently in the capital. That he was contemplating such a move is evident from a letter dated December 28, 1899, to Joseph Ruederer, in which Corinth acknowledged his gratitude to Leistikow and also spoke of the congenial relationship developing between him and Max Liebermann.^[102] Otto

Eckmann, too, who since 1897 had taught at the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts, did his utmost to make Corinth feel at home. He offered him the best wine from his cellar and asked his wife to prepare Corinth's favorite East Prussian dishes.

The commissioned portraits Corinth painted in the fall of 1899 include that of the gynecologist Dr. Ferdinand Mainzer (B.-C. 187), who had recently married Leistikow's former student Gertrud Sabersky; that of Richard Israel (Fig. 75), Leistikow's benefactor and a generous supporter of the Berlin Secession; and that of Israel's father-in-law, Emil Cohn (B.-C. 183), who owned two Berlin newspapers, the Volkszeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt . In these works, in contrast to the intimate format he usually chose for the portraits of his friends, Corinth adopted a larger canvas, showing the figures in half and three-quarter length before a neutral ground. There is generally also greater emphasis on the modeling of the individual forms. Verisimilitude and allusion to the sitter's accomplishments were expected in these portraits, and Corinth dutifully delivered psychologically neutral but faithful depictions of the successful physician, merchant, and publisher. At this time Corinth also began a full-length portrait of Israel's wife, Bianca, dressed in an elegant white gown. Dissatisfied with the picture, however, he destroyed it before it was finished.

An interesting and much more personal conception prevails in the portrait of Frau Rosenhagen (Fig. 76), the mother of the Berlin critic Hans Rosenhagen, who was Leistikow's friend and one of the first outspoken defenders of the Berlin Secession. The painting was a labor of love. Corinth knew the sitter well from his previous visit to Berlin and other encounters in Munich, where Rosenhagen and his mother usually stopped each year on their way to their summer retreat. With this painting Corinth returned to a portrait formula that had last occupied him in 1892 (see Plate 5), except that now light also assumes an expressive rather than merely a descriptive function, reinforcing the sitter's dominance over the interior she occupies. Corinth painted Muttchen Rosenhagen, as friends called her, sometime in November—and in the course of a little more than five hours—in the small Berlin apartment she shared with her son.^[103] Corinth neither diminished the ravages of old age nor disguised the dour mien of a sitter well known for her cantankerous spirit. The high forehead is exposed, the thinning hair fluffed up above the ears. The cheeks are sunken, the narrow lips firmly closed, the dim eyes surrounded by red circles. Everything about the sitter speaks of resolute composure and of an unmistakable will to control both herself and others. This psychological projection gives meaning to the light that pervades the painting. The light, strongest in the flesh parts, is absorbed by the plush upholstery of the couch and the reddish brown tones of the dress but flickers up again in the pillow

Figure 76
Lovis Corinth,  Portrait of Mother Rosenhagen , 1899. Oil on canvas,
63 × 78 cm, B.-C. 182. Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Nationalgalerie, Berlin (West) (A II 984).
Photo: Jörg P. Anders.

and the sleeve, in the brooch, and in the long chain of the gold necklace. From there it gradually invades the rest of the interior, from the sparkling coffee still life and the gleaming furniture and picture frames to the lamp on the table in the adjacent room.^[104]

A similar intuitive grasp of the interrelation of content and form is seen in the painting of a reclining female nude (see Plate 11), also painted in Berlin. Here Corinth's depiction of the female body, for so long the subject of formal analysis, has undergone a profound change. Indeed, he had never before captured the erotic allure of the female with such conviction. The ecstatic posture of the model is far removed from the conventional studio pose. She writhes provocatively on disheveled sheets, her voluptuous body set off against the white bedding; the mass of dark hair and the black stockings fur-

ther accentuate the warm skin tones. The broad brushstrokes are in part so independent of any descriptive function that they translate the image into a pictorial metaphor for rapture. Corinth most likely painted the picture in the quarters he had rented during his stay in Berlin at Körnerstrasse 26, and it must have been a rare felicitous moment indeed that allowed him to abandon himself to his own sensual experience and thus to transcend the coy suggestiveness and forced eroticism of his earlier nudes from the 1890s, such as the one he had adapted to his irreverent print Good Friday (see Fig. 59). That Corinth painted the picture rapidly and without much premeditation is suggested by the remains of an old signature still visible about halfway up the center of the canvas. Intoxicated by the image before him and seeking to capture the experience quickly, he apparently reached for one of his finished pictures and painted the nude right over it.

Exactly when Corinth began work on the remarkable painting of Salome (see Plate 12) is not known. The preliminary oil sketch (B.-C. 170), now in the Busch-Reisinger Museum, is undated; the finished version is inscribed with the year 1900. Corinth may have begun the painting before his journey to Berlin, completing it after his return to Munich in early January 1900.^[105] Disregarding traditional conventions, he transposed the familiar subject into a milieu that is not only outrageously modern but also downright commonplace. The makeshift robes and vulgar figure types give the scene the character of a tableau vivant staged by studio models at a costume ball. This impression is reinforced by the nonchalant detachment with which the gruesome episode is reenacted. The executioner, still holding the bloody sword, watches with satisfaction as the headless body of the Baptist is carried away. Herod's daughter, arriving as if by chance with her female companions at the site of the beheading, examines the head of Saint John, leaning forward for a better look, her voluptuous breasts almost touching the Baptist's beard. With unruffled curiosity, she daintily pries open one of the saint's eyes, as if to force him to acknowledge her beauty, if only in death. The eight life-size figures, some partly hidden, are grouped in the foreground in a tight-knit composition that is cut on all sides, a device that further intensifies the immediacy of the portrayal. It is as if the viewer too had happened on the scene.

Salome belongs to the general theme of sexual conflict discussed earlier in relation to Corinth's output from Munich. A favorite paradigm of sadistic love in both painting and sculpture by the 1880s,^[106] the subject became even more popular after the publication of Oscar Wilde's play in 1893. Yet Corinth apparently did not get to know Wilde's play until 1902, when it was first performed in German translation in Berlin. His Salome, moreover, unlike Wilde's de-

praved vampire, is capricious rather than possessed by evil desires—more like a character from an Offenbach operetta and similar in spirit to the caricature of Salome that Jules Laforgue published in La Vogue in the summer of 1886 in one of his Moralités légendaires .^[107]

Soon after completing the Salome , Corinth applied for the necessary papers to submit the painting to the upcoming exhibition of the Munich Secession. He had not exhibited with the group since 1893 and perhaps assumed that his growing reputation in Berlin had mollified those who still remembered his role in the "plot" of the Free Association and that he would be welcomed back into the cultural life of the city. But when the executive board of the Munich Secession rejected his application, he discovered that the old grievances were still very much alive. Walter Leistikow, on a visit to Munich, praised the Salome highly and told Corinth to send it to the next exhibition of the Berlin Secession instead, assuring him that it would be enthusiastically received.

This episode taught Corinth that Munich was unlikely to offer him the professional satisfaction and financial success he had begun to enjoy in Berlin. Thus he was happy to accept an invitation from Richard and Bianca Israel to join them at their country estate at Schulzendorf, not far from Berlin, for an extended period of work and relaxation. There, between the end of May and the end of June 1900, Corinth painted three portraits: a full-length portrait of Bianca Israel in formal evening attire (B.-C. 175), clearly a substitute for the abortive painting of the previous winter;^[108] a more personal and intimate picture of Bianca Israel seated in the garden (B.-C. 191); and a group portrait of the four Israel children (B.-C. 195). In July the Salome was included in the second exhibition of the Berlin Secession and, as Leistikow had predicted, turned out to be a sensational success. "The painting has been executed with great technical, almost academic bravura," wrote Hans Rosenhagen in his review of the exhibition in Die Kunst . "One gets the impression of a certain perversity. . . . Among all of Corinth's paintings this Salome is surely the most original and interesting."^[109] The painting, reproduced as a full-page illustration accompanying Rosenhagen's review, solidified Corinth's reputation as one of the most compelling figure painters of his time.

Following a trip with Leistikow through Denmark, Corinth returned briefly to Munich in early August, but by September he was back in Berlin, where he took a temporary atelier at Lützowstrasse 82, where both Leistikow and Edvard Munch had earlier maintained studios. His circle of friends was considerably enlarged when he joined the Freundschafts- und Rosenbund that Leistikow had founded in honor of Gerhart Hauptmann. Among the group's regular members—besides Leistikow and Hauptmann himself—were Ludwig

Figure 77
Lovis Corinth,  Portrait of Gerhart Hauptmann , 1900. Oil on canvas,
88 × 107 cm, B.-C. 202. Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim.

von Hofmann and the Norwegian painter Bernt Grönvold; depending on the occasion, this contingent was augmented by various guests. The statutes governing the group were simple: each member took his turn inviting the others for dinner; champagne was the official drink. It must have been an odd sight indeed to watch the initiates take their seats around a table adorned with roses, for each member also wore a rose garland on his head. One of the more memorable dinners was the one Gerhart Hauptmann gave in December 1900 at the Palast Hotel after the dress rehearsal of his drama Michael Kramer : the regulars were joined by Otto Brahm, director of the Deutsches Theater; the actors Rudolf Rittner and Max Reinhardt, both of whom were then still members of Brahm's ensemble; and Hauptmann's publisher, Samuel Fischer.

The portrait Corinth painted of Gerhart Hauptmann (Fig. 77) in October 1900 depicts the playwright in the privacy of his study at his home in Berlin-

Grunewald. Hauptmann (1862–1946), not yet thirty-seven years old, was at the height of his career, having attained a reputation as one of the chief exponents of modern drama. His plays include Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889), a drama that inaugurated the realist movement on the modern German stage; Die Weber (1892), a powerful dramatization of the uprising of the Silesian weavers in 1844; and Florian Geyer (1895), a historical play set amid the conflicts of the German Peasants' Rebellion of 1524–1525. Michael Kramer was his twelfth and most recent drama.

The prototype for the Hauptmann portrait is the portrait of Frau Rosenhagen (see Fig. 76). Once again the setting manifests the sitter's personality both explicitly and implicitly. Light, most fully concentrated in the face, pervades the painting in ever diminishing nuances. The domestic ambience of the Rosenhagen portrait, however, has given way to one befitting the intellectual and aesthete: the books signify the dramatist's professional life; the statuette on the table may allude to Hauptmann's earlier thoughts of becoming a sculptor. Hauptmann appears frail in the loose-fitting suit and high collar. His nervous fingering of the pages of a book contradicts his relaxed posture and affable expression. He appears at once physically close and psychologically distant, an impression the dramatist apparently conveyed often to those who knew him. According to Max Liebermann, Hauptmann was a man of great charm, but too preoccupied with himself to have any genuine interest in others. A good observer and listener, in conversation he generally revealed little of his own thoughts.^[110] He was also rather conceited, as the adulatory atmosphere of the Freundschafts- und Rosenbund makes abundantly clear, and unusually sensitive about his public image. In 1900 he had not yet acquired the physical resemblance to Goethe that later distinguished him, and he was reluctant to be photographed or to have his picture published.^[111] In this context Corinth's portrait gains added documentary importance.

In November Corinth had another one-man exhibition in Berlin, this time at the Cassirer gallery. As the year that had begun inauspiciously drew to a close, Corinth enjoyed a fairly secure reputation in the German capital as well as the promise of further personal and financial rewards. The self-portrait (Fig. 78) he painted in Berlin that year suggests his energetic self-confidence. It may be no accident that this self-portrait is also the first painting in which Corinth shows himself with the tools of his profession. Palette and brushes in hand, he stands before the picture of a female nude (B.-C. 193) from the same year. His gaze is both probing and introspective; his posture and gesture

Figure 78
Lovis Corinth,  Self Portrait without Collar , 1900. Oil on canvas,
73 × 60 cm, B.-C. 198. Berlin Museum, Berlin.
Photo: Hans-Joachim Bartsch.

speak of a resolute commitment to work. By comparison, the preceding Self-Portrait with Skeleton (see Plate 9) takes on a pessimistic tone that gives added meaning to the vanitas symbol of the studio prop. In the self-portrait of 1900 Corinth confronts his image together with his own "living" art in the form of a painting that bears the reassuring title Morning .

Late in December Corinth began another major figure composition, Perseus and Andromeda (B.-C. 208), with the clear intention of repeating, possibly even improving upon, the success of the Salome . The large scale of the painting—its original dimensions both more than six feet—brought with it repeated frustrations until Corinth finally cut the canvas down to its present, though still substantial, size.^[112] Little is known about the reception of the painting at the Berlin Secession exhibition in May 1901. Corinth himself seems to have been pleased only with the figure of the heroine, a naturalistic depiction of the female nude, seen in the uncompromising light of the studio. While he labored on Perseus and Andromeda , he also painted several portraits, one of them—most likely the full-length portrait of Frau Liese Simon (B.-C. 197)—a commission obtained on the recommendation of Bianca Israel that netted him 3,500 marks.^[113]

Having thought for some time of taking up permanent residence in Berlin, Corinth needed no further encouragement to make up his mind. At the end of March he left for Munich to wind up his affairs there and to arrange for the removal of his belongings to Berlin. In August and September he spent several weeks at Tutzing on the Starnberger See. Max Halbe was there as well, and the two were frequently joined by Frank Wedekind and Eduard von Keyserling.

At Tutzing that summer, on the terrace of Halbe's summer home, Corinth painted Keyserling's portrait (see Plate 13).^[114] Eduard von Keyserling (1855–1918) had settled in Munich in 1895 to embark on a literary career. Born and raised on his ancestral estates in western Latvia, he came from a family whose forebears in the fifteenth century had been vassals of the Teutonic Knights. The practice of frequent intermarriage among blood relatives had produced in him a hybrid of intellectual acumen and physical frailty. In 1893 he experienced the first symptoms of an incurable spinal disease, and from 1908 on blindness led him to withdraw gradually from society. World War I cut him off from his Latvian sources of income, and he died in self-imposed seclusion in Munich in 1918. Keyserling's writings grew out of his life experience and his memories. His short stories and novels about the Latvian nobility are pervaded by wistful melancholy at the passing of a cherished way of life. In the

sublimated culture he so sympathetically describes, an almost ritual adherence to conventions is paired with resignation, and even dying out becomes a noble act.

Keyserling was forty-five or forty-six at the time the portrait was painted and had not yet developed his characteristic style as a writer. It is impossible to say whether Corinth knew of the illness that had begun to undermine Keyserling's health. But even if he did, his almost clinical probing of the man's character and physical constitution could not be any less astonishing. Keyserling, shown in three-quarter length and off-center, sits quietly before a simple ground that is divided horizontally about halfway up the canvas into a darker and a lighter bluish gray field animated by vigorous brushstrokes but otherwise devoid of environmental allusions. He holds his hat on his knee as if he had stopped by for only a brief visit. The immediate impression is one of calm and passivity, so unlike the assertive presence that usually marks Corinth's portraits of his male friends. Yet on closer analysis Keyserling's personality expresses itself: in the well-groomed hands, which even in repose betray a nervous sensibility; and in the face, which testifies—despite the quiet demeanor—to a rich emotional life. Indeed, the face carries the full import of the portrait, especially in conjunction with the body, whose frailty is accentuated by the loose-fitting jacket and shirt. Although Corinth limited his palette, color nonetheless plays an important part in the pictorial structure. The white tones of the shirt and vest provide an axis that links the face and the hands, and this axis is reinforced by touches of blue. The same blue is also found in the background but appears in its purest concentration in the stone of Keyserling's ring, in his necktie, and in his large eyes. It would be difficult to find among Corinth's earlier portraits an example of form serving expression more eloquently. With this painting he was on the threshold of a new beginning as a portraitist.

Corinth was aware that with his move from Munich to Berlin a major chapter in his development was coming to an end. In Munich his eyes had first been opened to a wider horizon, and his return to the city in 1891 was prompted in part by memories of his earlier and more innocent student years. Berlin now welcomed him as a mature master. The self-portrait of June 1901 reflects his recognition of this challenge (Fig. 79). Corinth dressed for the occasion with great care, adding for good measure an imposing broad-brimmed hat, as if to reinforce his new professional stature. Gazing pensively into the mirror, he contemplates rather than observes his image. Great calm emanates from the face, the only part of the painting that has been carefully modeled. Even the

Figure 79
Lovis Corinth, Self-Portrait with Model , 1901. Oil on canvas,
88 × 68 cm, B.-C. 216. Kunstmuseum Winterthur.
Photo: Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft.

physiognomic details of the young woman at his side are subordinated to the vibrating surface of the canvas. Like the brushes and palette he holds, she is little more than an attribute, another tool in the service of the painter. Corinth acknowledged the special nature of the picture by inscribing the canvas in the upper right corner with the date of his birth.

As of October 3, 1901, Corinth was officially registered as living in Berlin. Leistikow, who had just acquired larger quarters for himself and his growing family, offered Corinth his old studio at Klopstockstrasse 52.^[115] Stauffer-Bern had first occupied the studio in the 1880s; it was to remain Corinth's home for the rest of his life.